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Charlie Kirk went from a college dropout to building a $92 million-a-year political movement with a direct line to President Trump by 31

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Charlie Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, died on Wednesday, Sept. 10.

The conservative activist was speaking into a microphone at Utah Valley University, sitting beneath a white tent emblazoned with the slogans “The American Comeback” and “Prove Me Wrong,” when he was fatally shot. 

The attack comes just days after the start of the trial of a man charged with attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump—and Kirk’s reach was so vast that it was the president himself who announced his death.

“The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, later adding that he was ordering all American Flags throughout the U.S. to fly at half-mast until Sunday evening. 

It underscored the power Kirk had amassed in such a short time. At just 31 years old, he was already a political force with a direct line to the White House and a $100 million-a-year movement behind him. Trump had credited him with mobilizing the youth vote that propelled his 2024 victory, frequently hosting him at both Mar-a-Lago and the Oval Office.

Kirk dropped out of college to found Turning Point USA at just 18

Born in 1993 to a counselor mother and an architect father in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Kirk grew up in a conservative household with dreams of joining the military. As a teenager, he was an Eagle Scout who set his sights on West Point, the US military academy that trains officers. 

In a 2015 speech to the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley, he said getting into the Army was his ‘No. 1 dream in life’, but implied he was rejected for being a white man.

But that rejection became a sliding-doors moment that launched his political career. Instead of joining the Army, Kirk began dabbling in politics—volunteering for Illinois Republican Mark Kirk’s (no relation) Senate campaign while still in high school. 

He then wrote his first opinion piece for right-wing outlet Breitbart against what he called the “indoctrination” of liberal textbooks, which led to his first media appearance on the Fox Business channel at the age of 17.

From there, the speaking engagements started rolling in, and that’s how Kirk met his future mentor and cofounder, Bill Montgomery, who convinced him to dropout of college and go all-in on activism. Together, they co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012, when Kirk was just 18.

What started as a shoestring campus operation snowballed into a right-wing powerhouse. With backing from Republican donors like Foster Friess and Home Depot co-founder, Bernard Marcus,Kirk built Turning Point into one of the fastest-growing conservative nonprofits in America. 

A political powerhouse with millions of followers

Today, Turning Point says it has a presence in more than 3,500 high school and college campuses nationwide—and its revenue, per tax filings, has skyrocketed from $4.3 million in 2016 to $81.7 million in 2023. When combined with its political-action arm, Turning Point Action, that figure tops $92 million.

And as the non-profit’s popularity has surged, so too has Kirk’s. In his mid-20s, he became the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and just two years later made Forbes’ “30 under 30” list. 

By 30, he had become a household name in conservative circles, impossible to ignore despite stoking frequent backlash. He was both celebrated and criticized for accusations of spreading conspiracy theories on COVID-19, climate change, and the 2020 election, as well as anti-trans rhetoric.

But his influence was undeniable: Across social media, he had a huge following with more than 8 million followers on TikTok, 8.9 million on Instagram, 5 million on X and 3.8 million on YouTube.

His podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, has also built a large following—some reports suggest it’s downloaded between 500,000 and 750,000 times each day—and it consistently charts in the top top on Spotify and Apple. Meanwhile, several books to his name, including the 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine” and many speaking appearances, helped cement his status as one of America’s highest-profile conservative activists.

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Coupang CEO resigns over historic South Korean data breach

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December 10, 2025

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Coupang chief executive officer Park Dae-jun resigned over his failure to prevent South Korea’s largest-ever data breach, which set off a regulatory and political backlash against the country’s dominant online retailer.

The company said in a statement on Wednesday that Park had stepped down over his role in the breach. It appointed Harold Rogers, chief administrative officer for the retailer’s U.S.-based parent company Coupang Inc., as interim head.

Park becomes the highest-profile casualty of a crisis that’s prompted a government investigation and disrupted the lives of millions across Korea. Nearly two-thirds of people in the country were affected by the breach, which granted unauthorized access to their shipping addresses and phone numbers.

Police raided Coupang’s headquarters this week in search of evidence that could help them determine how the breach took place as well as the identity of the hacker, Yonhap News reported, citing officials.

Officials have said the breach was carried out over five months in which the company’s cybersecurity systems were bypassed. Last week President Lee Jae Myung said it was “truly astonishing” that Coupang had failed to detect unauthorized access of its systems for such a long time.

Park squared off with lawmakers this month during an hours-long grilling. Responding to questions about media reports that claimed the attack had been carried out by a former employee who had since returned to China, he said a Chinese national who left the company and had been a “developer working on the authentication system” was involved.

The company faces a potential fine of up to 1 trillion won ($681 million) over the incident, lawmakers said.

Coupang founder Bom Kim has been summoned to appear before a parliamentary hearing on Dec. 17, with lawmakers warning of consequences if the billionaire fails to show.

Park’s departure adds fresh uncertainty to Coupang’s leadership less than seven months after the company revamped its internal structure to make him sole CEO of its Korean operations. In his new role, Rogers will focus on addressing customer concerns and stabilizing the company, Coupang said.

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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

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7 hours ago

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December 9, 2025

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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.

In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.

The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”

And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”

Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.

To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”

Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.



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New contract shows Palantir working on tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE

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December 9, 2025

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Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.

USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.” 

“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.

Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.

While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.

In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”



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